[Avodah] orthodox non-compliance with Covid rules

[Joshua Meisner]

On Mar 17, 2021, at 11:25 AM, Rich, Joel wrote:
> IMHO the issue alluded to (in a post concerning orthodox non-compliance
> with Covid rules) may be more of one of not seeing the forest for the
> trees. When one is taught to look at the letter of the law exclusively one
> can forget about the spirit of the law. The goal becomes the technical
> compliance ...

This is a point that has been made often, even outside of the context
of the frum community (Zeynep Tufekci has a number of good articles
providing data points): that the fixation with hard rules such as
6 feet and 15 minutes rather than broad principles that could be
intelligently applied to specific situations (such as Japan's three
C's of avoiding close contact, crowded places, and closed spaces) and
a tendency for experts (or politicians, perhaps) to take hold of false
certainty (l'hakeil ul'hachmir) rather than a nuance born of an honest
acknowledgement of how little we knew are among the greatest systemic
failures of the Western COVID response.